BELGRADE, Dec. 22 (Tanjug) - Serbia's Foreign Minister Ivan Mrkic has said that the EU's deicision to set the start date for the accession talks with Serbia has nothing to do with recognizing Kosovo, and that it is a much more complex thing, affected by the policy of the government and the talks between Belgrade and Pristina. "If anyone thinks, I guess out of a need for a sensation, that we will be required to recognize Kosovo right before the decision to integrate Serbia into the EU, we will not do that," he told the daily Politika answering whether Belgrade had recognized Kosovo by agreeing to the framework for the talks.

Serbs in Kosovo are a hundred times safer now than before the talks and the Brussels agreement, he stressed. "We will now have a much stronger presence. That should be understood. We now have for the time an international legalization of the Serb community there. You now have the Serb community, Serb municipalities recognized by everyone and having authority to act acoording to their interest. Pristina has to follow that," Mrkic pointed out. "Our goal is to normalize the situation completely, for life to go on, goods to be traded, people to move freely," he noted, underscoring that Serbia's priority in foreign policy was to move closer to the EU, which it had done.